Quality and capacity of wireless cellular telecommunication networks requires a proper coverage of geographical areas with radio signals, which are provided through base stations. The operating parameters of a base station, such as operating frequency, antenna orientation, transmission intensity and so forth, are essential for access to the wireless services and have to be established in an initial planning procedures, which may include the consideration of as many as few hundred base stations for a metropolitan area. The planning procedure is used to estimate interference between base stations, which affects the performance of the radio network, in view of a target overall capacity for the wireless services.
In response to the continuously increasing demand for wireless network capacity, distributed small base station entities, have been considered, which have been defined as metro, nano, pico and femto base stations with a smaller radio coverage in comparison to macro base stations. In order to enable the addition of further base stations into an established network, self-organizing capability has been introduced, which allows for automatic configuration of the operating parameters of base stations. For proper operation of the self-organization, a robust and reliable procedure to detect multiple base stations arranged in a neighborhood of a base station with self-organizing capability is desired, in particular for the case that the base stations in the detection area are not time-synchronized.